The wine of nostalgia

As I was skinning the chickpeas for the soup that bubbled on the stove this evening, my mind went to some article I saw today in an art blog. In it, someone shared, in passing, how they learned in art school that nostalgia was not a good thing.

I kept going back and forth from the whole “nostalgia for artists”  perspective to how it can go sour or stale. Not sure which is worse. I also thought of memories that failed to produce nostalgia, and decided that perhaps the incompleteness was what created the essence of the feeling. Now Wikipedia has an article that elucidated me further about how the rest of the world views nostalgia, not just me a little before dinner, and I thought it was fascinating for it to have once been considered a disease. Anyway, back to the artists and whether and why it touches them one way or another.

The Wikipedia article describes the term as missing an idealized version of the past. The way I see it, there’s beauty in every day and many connections we make. Sometimes, we miss a moment or a person in that aching beauty as they are happening to us. can it be nostalgic even in the present? To me, some moments lost their beauty as they were played out eventually and their fragility has dissolved. Some balance has been achieved and nothing more to tell. Some, while initially holding nothing of the story but a blurry backdrop, are still alive. One of those odd examples is going to New York twice in a gray fall of Baba’s death. I don’t miss the cold or the wind of those days. Perhaps, at the moment even the sadness wasn’t really there as we didn’t know what was coming. I think back to worry, her still being with us, maybe not being perfect in everything we said or did…what? That sadness never resolved itself. Her death did, somehow, but not the chaotic, unknowing, loving but never enough place that family brings us to. Probably, there is a great context that would somehow explain it away…but could it also be the intensity of the feeling that we are returned to? I think back, again and again, to days of blind wondering of my twenties, painful but also enchanted with feeling present at all times. I think of snow and of waiting for the train, of just pulling through sometimes, or drinking in all that New York had for us. Is it idealized? No. but there is a beauty…and I was reminded of running, at intermission, to see the little models of stage sets in theatrical lobbies. Seeing that other world so small and so visible was true magic to me. And, surely, it didn’t hold sadness, maybe just a little, as nothing was happening there and no music played. I was so taken by that magic that had to try it myself…it became other things. It wasn’t the same.

I digressed, though. Back to the artists. What I keep trying to say is, the lure for me is a strong feeling. Emotion is a tricky medium, as people feel that they mostly arrived there themselves and weren’t told when to cry. I know, I am struggling to make the connection between us all recognizing humanity and feeling personal stuff about some places or events that often weren’t all that significant. The emotion remains the same, the yearning reaching to connect and make impersonal personal. That’s where I see the artist, and have problems with the dismissal of nostalgia. Perhaps some view nostalgia as sentimental, and have issues with sentimentality? Which would also manifest in getting teary at someone else’s Grandma story. And yes, I fight it because I don’t like sentimentality and don’t want to be associated with that. While the search for conducting emotions can easily dump you off  at some weepy bank.

I don’t know if any of this made any sense. To me, a miriad stories of nothing showed up, and missings of colors, weather, innocence…it is hard to tell them apart. I thought I’d be at peace with the whole nostalgic business. Instead, it dragged eternity with it, the mobius of stuff started or continued by us, made by others but had a part of us in it, and so on. Well. Melancholia overall is a powerful medium and makes us see sadness as pleasure. Perhaps through the nostalgic we feed the need for the sadness…to experience it along with the lightest of light.

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